Abstract
To connect course material to executive MBA student workplace experiences and current events more clearly, we created an online space for students to bring up relevant workplace experiences or to post links to articles on domestic and international developments relevant to the week’s course topics and materials. The activity has brought forth significant student interactions online and in the classroom and paves the way for robust classroom discussion as well. Although we created this activity for executive MBA students, we believe it can also be used in other business courses, both graduate and undergraduate. With the experiences that executive MBA students bring, however, the interactions become especially helpful for modeling civility around difficult and divisive issues in business and society.
Keywords
Covering controversial topics on current ethical and social issues in business can be problematic, as students tend to have varying opinions on issues such as the #MeToo movement, tax cuts, minimum wage laws, businesses leveraging their market power to wrest tax breaks from states and municipalities, and more. David Gelles and Claire Cain Miller (2017) suggest the need to address such topics in the business classroom but also recommend approaching such topics with civility, critical thinking, and pedagogical effectiveness. This article shares our approach to this challenge.
As we prepared in the summer of 2016 for our team-taught 15-week course on Executive Leadership, we saw that the U.S. presidential campaign had the potential to escalate polarized discussions about business, leadership, and ethics. As the Executive Leadership class was one of the first two courses in our Executive MBA program, it seemed especially important to set the right tone for a cohort of students that would interact with each other for 18 months. Rather than avoid relevant contemporary issues in our nation and beyond, we were able to use this exercise to help students understand others’ points of view and discuss them rationally, even as the campaign, the election, and the first 2 months of the new administration were both attention-grabbing and divisive. Overall, the exercise worked so well that we have continued to use it successfully.
Here we share the details of the exercise along with a theoretical foundation to support its use. We also describe the results and specific directions for running and debriefing what we now call “Current Connections.” The exercise is a graded assignment, but need not be, as we discuss in Appendix A, which provides a list of possible variations to the exercise as described in this article.
Theoretical Foundation
The basic idea is for students to identify connections between our course material and current events. Students submit a link to an article in the media and clearly explain the connection between that article and some part of the week’s assigned materials. We also allow students to link course material to workplace situations as another form of “current events.”
Existing literature points to some effective strategies for dealing with controversial topics in the classroom, although these are limited to classroom discussion and not to writing (see, e.g., Baker, 2004). A subset of these articles focuses on facilitating difficult conversations in the classroom. Other articles discuss how to bring in current events and apply course concepts to these events through report writing (Halfhill, 1994). In that exercise, however, the instructor has identified the topics rather than enabling students to select their own examples. By allowing students to select topics, we used an approach similar to one suggested by Cotton (2006). She refers to this as Strategy 2: enabling students to discuss their own views. Also, we wanted the written work to serve as a way to defuse the controversy of the upcoming discussion (Hand & Levinson, 2012). These concerns led to our decision to forge a new path, one that involved a brief written submission, completed prior to the class discussion, on a topic of each student’s choice.
There is related literature on civility outside of the classroom, in life and in work, and how a crisis of incivility has emerged in our world (Arnett & Arneson, 1999; Ayim, 1997; Forni, 2002; Hall, 2013; Harden Fritz, 2012). Carter (1998) argues that an appreciation of civility will improve public life, and Bybee (2016) suggests that civil discourse can be moral and robust without sacrificing truth or freedom. In an interesting study of incivility in the higher education classroom, Boice (1996) found that both teachers and students engage in problematic incivilities, including sarcastic comments, highly emotional outbursts, belittling fellow class members, and reluctance to participate in discussion. Faculty members who are interested in encouraging civility in their classroom would be well advised to consult P. M. Forni’s (2003) book, Choosing Civility: The Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct. Through our exercise, we hoped to address these issues by both modeling, encouraging, and reinforcing classroom civility.
There are four underlying pedagogical frameworks that support our exercise. First, simply put, there is a connection between learning and experience (Dewey, 1938; Kolb, 1984; Fenwick, 2003), especially when teaching adults (Jarvis, 1987, 2006). The Current Connections exercise clearly illustrates these principles. The exercise is also consistent with Bloom’s Taxonomy (L. W. Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001; Bloom, 1956) that supports higher-order thinking through application and synthesis, rather than mere reporting of information. In creating a connection between personal workplace experiences, or current events in business, domestically or globally, students are encouraged to engage in higher order thinking.
Third, this exercise is consistent with the notion that a class can be transformed into a learning organization (Mazen, Jones, & Sergenian, 2000). Mazen et al. (2000) required their students to submit weekly reflections of the class, which were transcribed and distributed to the students at the beginning of the next class for discussion purposes. This approach is quite consistent with ours: It highlights the importance of reflection and vulnerability in learning and the courage of discussing “undiscussables” within a psychologically safe environment (Argyris, 1980; Mazen, 2012). Finally, the work on teaching for transfer (Perkins & Salomon, 1988) suggests that we need to facilitate students’ abilities to transfer theory to various problem-solving contexts so that they can interpret events through general principles.
Learning Objectives
Students will be able to:
Develop and engage in civil debate within the classroom
Immediately apply the content of the class to their work and to their lives
Expand their world view and develop awareness of current events
Clarify their leadership vision via integration of ethics, values, purpose, and goals.
In addition to introducing students to traditional ethical perspectives (Kantian/deontological, utilitarian, Aristotelian, communitarian), we also focus on organizational ethics and leadership with an emphasis on behavioral ethics. The framework is to think not only about individual ethical decisions but also to put that into a business context and consider what core values are operative both personally and organizationally. Finally, in line with the college’s mission, we look at the impact of leadership on society.
Instructions for Running the Exercise
Overview
Although the exercise originated in anticipation of the 2016 election season, the potency of policy, leadership, and ethical issues has persisted, making the exercise just as relevant post-2016. After several improvements to the exercise, we now follow the process described below. Except for class discussion of current connections, the exercise is conducted entirely online. See Appendix A for ideas on how to use the exercise in a purely online course.
Our university follows a 10-week quarter system, and our Executive MBA program follows a 5-week system within each quarter. The course in which we have embedded this exercise covers 3 consecutive 5-week periods, for a total of 15 weeks, meeting once a week for a 4-hour session, and there are three faculty who team-teach the course. The course is titled “Executive Leadership” and integrates self-awareness, personal and organizational ethics, teams, leadership, ethical frameworks, power, negotiation, sustainability, and public policy. We approach civility as part of the conversation in all of these areas but most particularly with teams and leadership. Our approach draws from the ideas of social contract and team civility and emphasizes the need to have difficult but needed conversations about shared team agreements. Students submit the current connection to an online discussion thread as part of routine class preparation. Instructors review and evaluate each submission prior to each live class session. We require 10 posts in the 15-week course to allow a bit of leeway for students to miss some weeks without penalty.
Logistics and Instructions
Students have access to an online course “container” that has all assignments, readings, and a discussion board. Students read the week’s assigned materials, then post a link to a current news story or describe a relevant workplace experience 24 hours before class sessions begin. Their posts tend to run one to three paragraphs, with an appropriate link to the news story or a full description of the event, making clear which assigned reading is being connected to the news story or event. (See Appendix B for the description of the exercise provided in our course syllabus.) Discussion threads are open to all students, so they can and do comment on each other’s posts, which tells us which posts are most interesting and relevant to them.
Instructions for Debriefing
We start each class discussing important insights and conflicting views and, at times, asking students to address posts that attracted the most comments (e.g., there were many posts one week about President Trump’s decision to exit the Paris climate agreement). At times, we would refer to the students’ posts during class as relevant examples of course concepts. Because the connections were posted for all students to see, we sometimes experienced more difficult (contentious) in-class conversations, especially when racial, gender, and political issues emerged as topics, but these conversations were also opportunities to model civility. For example, one student posted a connection to an article about Pope Francis and his meeting with President Trump. Another student, who was a devout Catholic and a Trump supporter, raised concerns about this post in class. In short, she did not feel comfortable mixing religion and business. Both students were rather firm in their beliefs, and as we were scheduled to discuss power and negotiation concepts in this session, primarily via principled negotiation (Fisher, Ury, & Patton, 2011), we used the disagreement as an example of the importance of listening carefully to hear the interest behind the position, the importance of identifying stakeholders, and the need for respect of alternative viewpoints. See Appendix C for a few examples of class discussion that arose from selected contentious current connections.
Although we have moved well past the November 2016 election, there has been no shortage of controversial issues in the time elapsed. To illustrate, Appendix D contains a sampling of the topics and associated course readings provided by the students.
Conclusion
The current connections exercise is relatively simple to use, allows flexibility and even creativity for students, who find their own contemporary cases of conflicting values in leadership and management in the larger world. The exercise was so well received and so useful for in-class discussion that we will continue its use. Our students appear to be appreciative of the exercise, and, in fact, have commented on how the habit of reviewing media daily started with this exercise.
At a time when facts and truth are very much in dispute—the age of “fake news,” bots in social media, and polarized, uncivil discourse—there is no shortage of controversial issues. We are also mindful that students can find connections that are not as widely broadcast in mainstream or alternative media sites, issues that go largely uncovered by mainstream media. Faculty could choose to avoid conversations about these issues based on their own personal views, yet we strongly encourage consideration of bringing controversy into the classroom. To do so encourages students to be aware of the world around them, to develop a world view, to establish a habit of reflection, to understand how leadership and management affects many situations, and to make their own connections between class materials and contemporary problems. Perhaps most important, this exercise provides a structure within which civil debate can be modeled in a safe space: the management classroom.
Footnotes
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Appendix D
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to our colleagues Buie Seawell and Scott McLagan for collaborating on this exercise and team-teaching with us.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.